What are the best hosting options available?

Nicole wrote:

Hi,
if you expect high user traffic (say, more than a few hundred CCUs), we recommend to use a decdicated, physical server. You simply get more bang for your buck.

But you also need to consider a few more things:
- hosting center location (near to your end users - to avoid high latency)
- pricing for network traffic
- NIC and uplink port speed should match the server's CPU size

As an example: on Photon Cloud, a dedicated quad core server (Xenon 3440 for example) with a 100Mbps NIC can serve 1000-1500 CCU, and generate > 10 TB traffic / month. (This might of course vary a lot for your game). A VPS that could handle an equal amount of traffic is *way* more expensive. (Of course, VPS might be sufficient if you only have little user traffic or want to use them as an additional resource to handle traffic bursts.)

That being said - a few recommendations (for the bigger hosting providers who all have several data centers around the world):
On the "higher" end, I can definitely recommend SoftLayer, Rackspace or Datapipe. Microsoft Azure works well for VPS, too, although bandwidth costs are quite high.
If you are on a tight budget, LeaseWeb might be worth a look - they have really good prices.
We also checked out Amazon EC2, but found that performance & latency were not sufficient.

Maybe other users could share their experience here as well, would be glad to hear it!